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Russian Evangelicals Promised Tolerance

Dan Graves, MSL

Near Easter in 1905, Christian leaders, who were in St. Petersburg for
a conference, received an invitation to the palace of Princess Lievan.
An announcement was to be made, they were told--an announcement that
would bring them great joy. They were given no hint of its content.

"What are we here for? What is happening?" asked the small group of
invited men who appeared at the palace early the next morning. No one
knew. Which was just how Tsar Nicholas II wanted it. He wanted to spring
a little surprise.

The surprise was a manifesto of religious tolerance. Jakob Kroeker,
who was there on this day, April 16, 1905,
left an account of the emotional scene. "When all the guests arrived,
one of the big folding doors opened and our beloved princess came into
the room, deeply moved, holding a copy of the Manifesto in her hand. She
could hardly read the glad news for inner excitement and joy. When she
had finished, those present joined in thanks and worship to the Lord.
Not an eye remained dry and not a mouth dumb."

And little wonder. Evangelical Christians in the Russian empire had
suffered cruelly for two hundred years. Despite this, their numbers had
grown steadily. Tsars from Peter the Great onward had found it expedient
to offer some concessions to the emerging religious force. But as is
almost always the case when there is a state religion, the established
church pressed hard to retain its monopoly and was often guilty of
persecution.

Religious tolerance was also incorporated in the October Manifesto
of 1905, which took its final shape under Finance Minister Sergei
Yulievich Witte, an Orthodox Russian, who candidly acknowledged that he
would have preferred to establish a military dictatorship.

As good as the news was, it soon soured. Nicholas II was a weak man
who began to take back his concessions almost as soon as he made them.
This was unfortunate and helped play into the hands of the
revolutionaries who eventually toppled him, the last Tsar, from
power.

Western evangelical ideas were not the only thoughts spreading
through Russia in those days. Freethinking, agnosticism, rationalism and
other God-hating ideologies flourished in the troubled land. Had the
evangelical church been free to carry out its mission, with the social
uplift that usually follows the Gospel, perhaps the Marxist regime that
took power in 1917 would never have emerged to crush the Russian people
(not to mention the rest of the world) under a heavy boot of oppression
for seventy years.